Lieutenant Robert
Fitzgerald has managed to retain his sanity, his humanity, and his honor
during the hell of WWI's trench warfare. Charlotte Braninov fled the
shifting storm of the impending Russian Revolution for the
less-threatening world of field camp medicine, serving as a nurse in the
most hopeless of fronts. Their friendship creates a sanctuary both
could cling to in the most desperate of times. Historical fiction about
life, loss, and love, By the Hands of Men explores the power that lies
within each of us to harm - or to heal - all those we touch.

Charlotte Braninov,
traumatized by loss and her service as a frontline nurse, returns to
war-torn Russia to find her family. Captured by the Red Army, she
exchanges one hell for another. Her still-loyal Lieutenant, Robert
Fitzgerald, believing the woman he loves is dead, struggles to recover
from the ravages of combat and typhus. In a desperate bid to rediscover
himself, he commits to serve his country as a pawn in distant Shanghai.
Forging their destinies in a world reeling after The Great War,
Charlotte and Robert will learn anew the horror and the beauty the hands
of men can create when they descend into the flames.================================

================================

Roy "Griff" Griffis Talks about Roy "Griff" Griffis &

His Writing

Born in Texas City, TX, the son of a career Air Force meteorologist.
Attended a variety of schools at all of the hot spots of the nation,
such as Abilene, Texas and Bellevue, Nebraska. Sent to my grandparent’s
house in Tucson, Arizona when things were tough at home. I was pretty
damn lost, as my grandparents were largely strangers to me. My older
brother, a more taciturn type, refused to discuss what was going on.
Fortunately, like so many kids before me, I was rescued by literature.
Or, at least, by fiction. In a tiny used bookstore that was just
one block up from a dirt road, I discovered that some good soul had
unloaded his entire collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “John Carter of
Mars” series in Ballantine Paperback. Moved by some impulse, I spent my
RC Cola money on the first book, A Princess of Mars. I think what
struck me was how these books were possessed of magic: they were able to
transport me far from this dusty land of relatives who I didn’t know
and relatives pretended not to know me to another dusty land of
adventure, heroism, nobility, and even love. It was the first magic I’d
encountered that wasn’t a patent fraud, and when I closed the stiff
paperback with the lurid images on the cover, I decided it was the kind
of magic I wanted to dedicate the rest of my life to mastering. And,
thus, I was saved. Since then, I’ve never looked back. I’ve
written poems, short stories (twice runner-up in the Playboy college
fiction contest), plays (winning some regional awards back East and a
collegiate Historical Play-writing Award), and screenplays. I’m a member
of the WGAw, with one unproduced screenplay sold to Fox Television.
Along the way, I’ve done the usual starving artist jobs. Been a janitor,
a waiter, a clerk in a bookstore. I was the 61st Aviation Rescue
Swimmer in the Coast Guard (all that Tarzan reading wasn’t wasted). I’m
also not a bad cook, come to think of it. Currently, I’m a husband,
father, and cat-owner. I’m an avid bicyclist and former EMT. I
live in Southern California with my lovely wife. My friends call me
“Griff,” my parents call me “Roy,” and my college-age son calls me
“Dadman.” It’s a good life. By the Hands of Men, Book Three: The Wrath
of a Righteous Man will be released in May, 2016.

Enter to win 1 of 5 BY THE HANDS OF MEN Series eSets The Old World and Into the FlamesBut wait, there's MORE!Each of the five winners will receive an ARC eCopy of Book 3!(That's because Tome Tender wouldn't allow Griff to offer a date with the author as a prize)International Where AllowedEnds May 9, 2016 @11:59PM

Thank you for the praise, Ms. D! Lessee, research: a lifetime's worth? I probably got my love for history from my father and so I've been reading it for a long time. However, once I began work on what was supposed to be the only book of By the Hands of Men, I spent about a year writing and researching it. The second book took a bit longer. I have some general knowledge of the time periods the novels are set in, but I really like to get a sense of the mores, the conventions, even the small annoyances of the time period, all to give a sense to the reader that they are either living the story or are reading a book that was written contemporaneously with the events. As such, I tend to start writing down the story I'm seeing/hearing in my head, and do research on the side to feed my subconscious, as it were.

Two secrets revealed here: first, I set myself an artistic challenge to write the novel in the style of the times. I was going for vocabulary, word choice, even the way the sentences were constructed. Naturally, that would include trying to honor the social conventions of what was and was not acceptable to publicly discuss. Second...I was planning a trilogy. Honest. Book Two ran to about 950 pages when complete, and I discovered my publisher, CreateSpace, was physically unable to produce it in one volume. So I was forced to break Book Two into two separate volumes, "Into the Flames" and the forthcoming "The Wrath of a Righteous Man."

Next up? I'm currently editing the second volume of "The Lonesome George Chronicles." Book Three of that is written, as well (ran into almost the exact same problem re: page length with that series). After I complete BTHOM4, I'll write LG4.